Book Image

Getting Started with Python for the Internet of Things

By : Tim Cox, Steven Lawrence Fernandes, Sai Yamanoor, Srihari Yamanoor, Prof. Diwakar Vaish
Book Image

Getting Started with Python for the Internet of Things

By: Tim Cox, Steven Lawrence Fernandes, Sai Yamanoor, Srihari Yamanoor, Prof. Diwakar Vaish

Overview of this book

This Learning Path takes you on a journey in the world of robotics and teaches you all that you can achieve with Raspberry Pi and Python. It teaches you to harness the power of Python with the Raspberry Pi 3 and the Raspberry Pi zero to build superlative automation systems that can transform your business. You will learn to create text classifiers, predict sentiment in words, and develop applications with the Tkinter library. Things will get more interesting when you build a human face detection and recognition system and a home automation system in Python, where different appliances are controlled using the Raspberry Pi. With such diverse robotics projects, you'll grasp the basics of robotics and its functions, and understand the integration of robotics with the IoT environment. By the end of this Learning Path, you will have covered everything from configuring a robotic controller, to creating a self-driven robotic vehicle using Python. • Raspberry Pi 3 Cookbook for Python Programmers - Third Edition by Tim Cox, Dr. Steven Lawrence Fernandes • Python Programming with Raspberry Pi by Sai Yamanoor, Srihari Yamanoor • Python Robotics Projects by Prof. Diwakar Vaish
Table of Contents (37 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Functions in Python


We briefly discussed functions in Python. Functions execute a predefined set of task. print is one example of a function in Python. It enables printing something to the screen. Let's discuss writing our own functions in Python.

A function can be declared in Python using the def keyword. A function could be defined as follows:

def my_func(): 
   print("This is a simple function")

In this function my_func, the print statement is written under an indented code block. Any block of code that is indented under the function definition is executed when the function is called during the code execution. The function could be executed as my_func().

Passing arguments to a function:

A function is always defined with parentheses. The parentheses are used to pass any requisite arguments to a function. Arguments are parameters required to execute a function. In the earlier example, there are no arguments passed to the function.

Let's review an example where we pass an argument to a function...